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Situation: I am using Linux Mint 18.2 Cinammon 64bit with Virtualbox installed. Within Virtualbox, I have a single virtual machine (VM) - Windows 7 64bit - with four snapshots (each a uniquely configured environment for a specific purpose, eg.photoshop, software testing).

For a half of year everything was running perfectly. Yesterday, I booted the PC after two days of down time, and every time I start any VM snapshot, both Virtualbox and the host system (Linux Mint) absolutely freeze (ie. the mouse and keyboard are unresponsive).

I've since reinstalled Virtualbox, and have checked that my Linux system has all updates installed.

Question: in your opinion, what steps should be taken (basic or more advanced), to investigate such a fault and to determine the cause(-s)? Which logs to check first, what tool to use for diagnosis?

Update For those, who have same problem. I was installing Virtualbox using Linux Mint Software Manager. Software Manager installs VirtualBox v5.0, which is outdated. After downloading directly from virtualbox website and installing latest Virtualbox (v5.2), described problem dissapeared.

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  • By any chance, are you booting via UEFI/using secure boot with Linux Mint?
    – Nasir Riley
    Commented Jan 22, 2018 at 21:02
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    I have the same problem and I am not booting via UEFI. I suspect this might be due to the latest kernel updates but I cannot confirm this. It is baffling to me that ANY software running in user space may completely crash the whole system (networking, peripherals, everything goes down).
    – alexsh
    Commented Jan 27, 2018 at 4:04

2 Answers 2

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I had a similar problem once, the graphics card was too weak and therefore the screen froze. If I pressed CTRL-ALT-F3 I could still access my terminal very slowly.

Here are my thoughts:

  1. Check if ram maxes and swap is used extensively when VM starts e.g. using top or htop and checking the ram and swap bars
  2. Check iotop if the process maxes out and stops user inputs from being processed
  3. Check the GPU usage and it's memory usage e.g. radeontop or the appropriate one for your gpu
  4. Try restricting CPU usage to 80 % for a start -> in VM settings you can set this in processor settings
  5. Check your RAM (especially) and whole system (memtest and mprime/prime95 are my choices for this)

Edit: inserted commands

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    Please give exact command lines for your five suggestions, ie. exactly how to perform each check.
    – user1404316
    Commented Jan 28, 2018 at 22:18
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I faced the same problem. Since previously installed virtualbox from the default Mint repos, I tried to install the current release directly from https://www.virtualbox.org/

Thus, I was able to launch VMs once again.

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